Onaro SANscreen Application Insight Optimizes Storage Performance and Availability for Princeton Softech
BOSTON, MA – August 8, 2007 - Onaro, Inc. (http://www.onaro.com), the leader in storage service management, announced today that Princeton Softech (www.princetonsoftech.com), the market leader in enterprise data management, is using SANscreen Application Insight to gain never-before visibility into the alignment of storage resources with application requirements.
Thousands of organizations worldwide, including nearly half of the Fortune 500, rely on Princeton Softech’s Optim™ solutions to help maximize application performance and availability, mitigate risk and control costs. To support these customers, Princeton Softech is a heavy user of SAN technology with more than 200 TB of storage and hundreds of switch ports. Maintaining the alignment of these storage resources with application requirements is a key objective for the infrastructure team at Princeton Softech.
“We had minimal SAN management visibility,” said Jim Rosikiewicz, manager of network services for Princeton Softech. “All we had was a simple Web interface for our switches. But I had no real cross-SAN visibility.”
Searching for a solution, Rosikiewicz looked at several alternatives, including a McData product, but concluded none provided the level of visibility into storage services that he required. Renewing his search, Rosikiewicz came across Onaro SANscreen Application Insight. Like all SANscreen solutions, Application Insight provides a new level of cross-SAN visibility that helps IT professionals optimize the alignment of storage resources with application service level requirements. Application Insight analyzes storage tier assignments, enables load balancing of the entire application portfolio across the SAN, and helps uncover infrastructure-related issues that can impact application performance.
Increasing SAN Utilization and Performance
Load balancing the application portfolio evenly across the storage infrastructure is critical to increasing utilization and lowering capital cost outlay. Application Insight understands all data paths taken by an application to its designated storage volumes. With this capability, Princeton Softech can easily see which hosts have access to which LUNs on which array.
“When I first lit up Application Insight, I found that 80 percent of my hosts were masked and mapped to one port of my storage array, instead of being balanced across all four,” Rosikiewicz recalled. “Without Application Insight, this wouldn’t have been visible. I was able to address the issue before it became a problem.”
Uncovering Infrastructure Related Issues
In addition to load balancing applications, Application Insight also helps Rosikiewicz manage SAN utilization to avoid problems. “I can set global thresholds for throughput, errors or load balancing. If a threshold is reached anywhere in the SAN, Application Insight provides an email alert telling me what threshold was reached and which switch port triggered the event. This feature allows me to be proactive rather than reactive. Now I can see when something looks questionable on a port, so I can address it before it impacts storage availability or application performance.”
This real-time alert capability also frees up scarce and valuable IT resources, Rosikiewicz noted. Prior to using Application Insight, a member of his team started every morning by logging onto each switch to make sure there were no problems with the switch and no events in the log.
Rosikiewicz said he also appreciates the trending information he now gets with Application Insight. “I can identify which ports have increased or decreased utilization over a specified period of time.”
Improved Service Quality
Rosikiewicz concluded that SANscreen Application Insight has had a real impact on his ability to keep Princeton Softech’s SAN operating at peak efficiency. “Our storage service quality is definitely better than before,” he said. “Installing SANscreen was like going from a dark room into a room filled with light. That visibility makes all the difference.”
“Onaro enables companies for the first time to align their storage resources with application service level requirements for maximum performance,” said Bryan Semple, vice president of marketing for Onaro, Inc. “We applaud Princeton Softech for their innovation and skill at maximizing their SAN utilization and controlling costs.”
About Princeton Softech
Princeton Softech (www.princetonsoftech.com) provides enterprise data management solutions that address critical business issues – data growth management, upgrades and migrations, test data management, application retirement, data retention, privacy compliance and e‑discovery. Princeton Softech Optim™ aligns the management of application data with business objectives to optimize performance, mitigate risks and control costs. Partnered with the market leaders in business technology, Optim delivers capabilities that scale across enterprise applications, databases and platforms. More than 2,400 companies worldwide – including nearly half of the Fortune 500 – rely on Princeton Softech’s proven solutions to maximize the business value of their enterprise applications and databases.
About Onaro, Inc.
Onaro is the leader in storage service management (SSM) enabling enterprises to increase service quality, return on storage, and compliance by managing storage as a service. Unlike traditional SRM applications which are device centric, Onaro provides a clear service view into a SAN’s access paths, redundancy, replication and performance. SANscreen is being used by the world’s largest companies in banking, retail, entertainment, data communications and wireless telecom. A partial customer list includes AOL, CareGroup Healthcare System, JetBlue Airways, Priority Healthcare, State Street Global Advisors, and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. For more information, please visit www.onaro.com.
